a single stupid phrase

by uzwi

I get [writer’s] block but I don’t mind because I figure it’s nature’s way of telling me I’m doing something wrong. Therefore I don’t call it that, either. I’m not going to learn anything by using a cliche to describe an important event in my own experience. Rather than call it block, & tie up, & spoil everything with some panic fix, I put it in a drawer–which that might be a month, it might be 5 years–until it fixes itself.

Describing any event in your life by using a cliche robs you of the actual content of the event, & by extension of the event itself. “Staycation” is bad but only irritating. Don’t you feel terror, though, followed quickly by rage, when mediation or advertising or other people’s laziness reduces a major personal event, something you perceived as a complex global change with massively intricate emotional fallout, to a single, stupid phrase ?

I find avoiding the jargon of my profession (information & knowledge management – what used to be known as “being a librarian”) almost impossible; it’s second only to skirting round numerous overused rhetorical traps. It’s good I think to learn a different language in this case – I have found that it helps to break up hackneyed syntactical/synaptic connections because like a child, or as someone inexpert, you are just going for the best raw fit in new vocabulary for what you want to express. It cuts the crap.

hey Mike M–I have been studying Mandarin for the last year and have found myself listening to English with a differently tuned ear, often wondering how anyone understands the street version if one is not a native speaker…
I also find myself walking down the street composing sentences in Chinese, rearranging sentence structure to go from on language to the other.
All of which greatly frees the conceptual adhesions that grow up between words and thoughts….

I’m interested in how you maintain the actuality of your experience in a world of stupid phrases. When you eat an ice cream, are you–as it were– “describing” that process every time: or are you having a “guilty pleasure” ? More importantly, that five-year catastrophe in which you wrecked two relationships, broke up two families, went to a foreign country on foot and caught the clap, then finally came home and tried in a pathetic and Timothy Spall-like fashion to fit yourself back into the wreckage: was it all that and much more, minute by minute ? Or was it a “mid life crisis” ? (Indeed, was it “just” a mid life crisis ? Dare you allow anyone to pass it off as that ?) I know which I’d prefer.

Graeme: I’d rather describe it by living it. But if it has to be described with words, I’d rather it be hyped than tagged. Like any other cliche, “staycation” already carries a reductive charge. It was just a staycation. It was just a mid life crisis. Been there, done that.

A lot of people seem to think and to perceive reality through bad, TV-based clichés – it’s like they were on some kind of auto-pilot.
And not only they do require a shorthand to describe the event, they also like the event to conform to certain expectations, to a certain ritual.
There’s an expected format, an empty ritual for everything – from college lectures to funerals.

The simulation of understanding seems to be preferred to actually understanding.

Non-conformers do it at their own risk – as a PhD student once told me at the end of one of my training seminars, “I understood everything you said, so you must not be that good at your job, after all.”

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

There’s also the opposite phenomenon: when you realize that what you thought was a complex personal experience is really just something *worthy* of such a catchphrase. That one’s even more demoralizing.

If there’s any event in a life that’s worthy of a catchphrase, that worthiness has surely been decided in negotiation with the culture that makes the catchphrases ? Doesn’t that very negotiation also diminish your experience of your own experience ? I think the cure is not to allow other people to demoralise you by reductively tagging the things that happen.

My complaint, I guess, is that in actual life it’s easy to walk away from someone who tries to reduce you; whereas you can’t shake off the constant reductive naming of things by the media (or by trades, lobbies, ad agencies, corporates, ideologies & bureaucracies). Every time you read something you’re in a bloody war over who gets to decide the shape of human experience, you or the lifestyle supplement.

I get demoralized by anything from vampiric management talk to Iggy Pop being best known for car insurance ads. Laughter barely helps. As Costello said, I used to disgusted, then I tried to be amused – but it all keeps coming: everything from the normative emotional arc “our lads” dying in Iraq to bland comics trying to be ironic on purpose because they haven’t the slightest glint of any bone-deep sense of humour.

All that reductive stricture in a becalmed culture is hard to dodge, but ditching tv is a good start. That, and remembering that most of this sensory inundation and bafflement arises because we’re still primates with senses geared to spotting tiny signs of food or danger in an unmediated setting: given the neon and sexual triggers of AdWorld, our brain simply picks up too much stuff ever to be comfy. In Burroughs’ great phrase, we’re just apes in the gasoline crack of history. So negotiation has involve deferment, a refusal, a retreat into private space. The trick is not to let that withdrawal become a wider contempt: we’re all “other people.”

Thankfully, I now realise, I didn’t know what a staycation was so I just looked it up on Wikipedia. This is part of what it has to say: “Common activities of a staycation include use of the backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals. Some staycationers also like to follow a set of rules, such as setting a start and end date, planning ahead, and avoiding routine, with the goal of creating the feel of a traditional vacation”. Does this make me a staycationer? Even if I don’t have a pool? Have I really been following a set of rules? HELP – how can I escape?

Funny AND irritating I guess, but if someone actually used the word in a conversation I’d have to stop talking to them.

Mike, how can we escape “the constant reductive naming of things by the media (or by trades, lobbies, ad agencies, corporates, ideologies & bureaucracies)”. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry and rant like hell but thats the way they sell us back our lives. Getting rid of capitalism is the only answer I can think of. In the mean time its that familiar list of things that gives me thinking and breathing space and even, sometimes, hope: reading (your) stories and novels, music, films, walking.

Having recently ‘lost’ my partner to cancer, cliches have taken on a new power to fill me full of rage and scorn. Perhaps unsurprisingly. Yet a few people can manage to say the right thing, rather than harping on about the healing power of time, etc.

12 comments, two disdaining TV. I don’t get it… the TV is not the brain-melting ad delivery platform you guys remember from the 90s. There’s DVRs, Bittorrent. Commercials don’t exist if you don’t want them to; it’s like complaining about pop-up ads on websites.

And sometimes cliches are a necessary evil. I get it that cliches should be avoided in prose, but sometimes you need a verbal shortcut. When someone asks me how my writing is going, do I expound on the difficulties of my process? Or do I just shrug and say “writer’s block”?

What confuses me about this discussion is just that cliches are defined by their popularity and recognizability. Any phrase becomes a cliche once it’s said enough, which means we’re really talking about hating things in the mainstream. Which is cliched in its own right.

Good cliches can put up with many rereadings and some creative misreadings as well before they break apart. Stupid phrases are more difficult to use well but I suppose … writer’s block? Oh, a block like where people live in houses and stuff only with writers this time instead of people? (It’s very strained now.)

My definition (partial definition, the part that matters): a stupid phrase, it’s stupid because you can’t see anything with your head in its ass and all it has is a big ass that’s always around your head. A good phrase: like sun glasses, but not rose colored, you always end up in a ditch with those and don’t know how to get up.

You could argue that the media’s use of these phrases is humbling rather than maddening. It shows that these events and emotions are common enough among all of us to have spawned a word. And that’s what words are — descriptions of our experiences. The event then only ceases to be special if the word becomes a crutch or a misdiagnosis.

So you don’t have to call it “writer’s block,” but if you do, there are 12 million Google results waiting for you — does that make your feeling worse, or improve it? I guess it’s case-by-case.

Descriptions are effective analogies or reminders, or they are incomprehensible babble to the listener. The problem in either case is that communication depends on experience that’s similar enough to be shared (on “shared experience”, which, incidentally, isn’t always as shared as one’d like to think). So what’s the point of telling a non-writer you have a writer’s block, if the purpose is to communicate actual information beyond meaningless formality (how do you do, etc)? It would be better to say “I am trying to discover how to proceed with my work and that’s taking some more time than I’d want it to, but one can’t have everything one wants.” It’s why you need an analogy when you have to explain to a bushman what it means to drive a car. That’s why the bushman needs an analogy when he has to explain to you what it means to hunt lions: “like hunting deer, only more dangerous.” But does that get you very close to the experience? Does it make you understand it? Could you do it yourself, hunt a lion, based on analogies and descriptions? Would you? “Writer’s block”? What does the expression tell anyone about the experience of trying to figure out what is the best way to move the plot forward or how much should be rewritten (and how)? Doesn’t the expression rather mislead than guide?

More poignantly, how does the analogy that your situation as a writer is, somehow, a “block” affect your own perception of your own experiences that remind you of the “description” (because you’ve heard it so often), and how does it affect the way you ultimately try to deal with those experiences you perceive as problematic? Does it limit your creativity in dealing with the problem?

I’m rolling my own eyes at my sounding like a woman’s magazine. But someone had to sacrifice and ask those questions, rhetorical as they are (the answers were given here in an earlier post by me).

I just reread MJH’s original post and realized that I have no idea what he would mean by “writer’s block”. How amusing! (And appropriate.)

“Getting rid of capitalism is the only answer I can think of.”

I think it would be safer to say that decentralization … in everything … is the answer, at least until the people become aware enough of the world around them to start weeding out sociopaths in business and government and finance by using brain-scanning technology. (Periodical lie-detector enhanced queries for the rest of the political class, of course. How utterly pathetic that lie-detector tests aimed at politicians aren’t already a routine part of elections in supposedly democratic countries. “We didn’t know liars or lie-detectors existed” doesn’t seem a compelling excuse at this point.)

You can charge me with wishful thinking on both accounts, I don’t mind. It’s entirely possible that there is only one answer, and it’s none of the above, but a long and hard one: to do what many, including MJH here (and elsewhere), already do: change the culture little by little, or at least offer some sort of resistance to the Gramscian hegemony of consumerism, which isn’t simple economism but is—so obviously it’s embarrassing not to have noticed—about power and total absolute control.